Most job hunters know the pain of going through all the different job portals
and applying for jobs one by one. In most cases, you write down your name,
location, education, etc., and provide your resume. And in most cases nowadays,
the resume will be parsed by an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) before any human
sees it.
There are just so many problems and unnecessary hassles with this approach.
Let's discuss them briefly, and I will propose a solution that will make life
easier for job hunters and job posters.
The Problems
- Repetition: You are repeating the same information about yourself again and
again. Apply to 50 companies, and you'll have to write down your name,
education, etc., 50 times.
- Signing up for a new job portal: This is just horrible. When you see a job
post on a site where you don't have an account, and you sign in, many cases
will ask for the same information, such as your name, education, picture,
skills, etc. It will take you almost 5-10+ minutes to fill out all this
information. Signing up for a different service means filling out the same
information again.
- ATS issues: Many sites have options to upload your resume, which will fill out
most of the form for you, such as your name and email, etc. Speaking from
experience, most of them do not work 100% correctly. I have to manually fix
some and add some information. And if you have a two-column resume, it's even
harder for the ATS to parse. Maybe with tools like Large Language Models
(LLM), this problem will improve.
The Solution
Now that we know the problems, what can be a possible solution? Let me propose
one. It's a simple structured text file, such as YAML. It will look something
like this, but it has to be a standard.
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84 | # common fields
name: Test User
location: Fake City, India
contact:
email: [email protected]
phone: +91 12345 67890 # make sure to include country code
linkedin: sujaudd1n # only username
github: sujaudd1n # only username
education:
- name: XYZ University
location: ABC City, India
duration: 2010 - 2014
degree: Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science
achievements:
- 'GPA: 3.5/10 (I was going for 9, but pizza happened)' # in '' because in yml you have to escape :
- University Topper in going late
- Published Research Paper which 12 people have read, including me
- name: PQR Institute
location: DEF City, India
duration: 2014 - 2016
degree: Master of Technology in Artificial Intelligence
achievements:
- Research Assistant
- Filed Patent, Now I Just Need to Remember What It Was For
links:
algorithms:
- name: Leetcode
url: https://leetcode.com/sujaudd1n
url_text: leetcode.com/sujaudd1n
open-source:
- name: Github
url: https://github.com/sujaudd1n
url_text: github.com/sujaudd1n
swe:
summary:
title: Senior Software Engineer
text: >
Meet the software engineer who learned the value of TDD from a very special teacher:
Murphy's Law. After a memorable SaaS meltdown in production, I learned to test before
I deploy. Now, my code works, and my blood pressure thanks me.
skills:
languages: [Go, Come, Python, C++]
libraries: [Jango, Reaction]
databases: [OurSQL, PostgreSQL, MangoDB]
work_experience:
- company-name: ABC Corporation
location: Fake City, India
role: Software Engineer
duration: 2016 - 2018
contributions:
- Developed a machine learning model for image classification for cat and not-cat
- Improved search engine performance by 2.18\%
- Collaborated on a new feature launch
- company-name: DEF Startups
location: ABC City, India
role: Software Engineer
duration: 2018 - 2020
contributions:
- Built a real-time analytics dashboard to watching numbers move in real-time
- Enhanced payment gateway reliability from "it usually works" to "it almost always works"
- Launched a new feature with the team in one night and most of tests failed in the morning
projects:
- name: Project Alpha
techstack: [Python, Django, MySQL]
details:
- Developed a web application for e-commerce where you can buy things
- Implemented a secure payment gateway...yes, your money is safe, ig
- Deployed on a cloud platform aka rented computers
- name: Project Beta
techstack: [Java, Spring, MongoDB]
details:
- Created a mobile app for social media because the world needed another one, right?
- Designed a functional chatbot
- Successfully deployed on a cloud platform
# these are mostly fake data
|
We can add additional fields, such as photo_url, certificates, etc. Not only
that, but we can also add language-specific, company-specific, or "anything"
specific information here. For example, for a JavaScript role, you can put all
the information related to JavaScript in a JavaScript key.
This simple file solves all the problems.
- You no longer have to repeat anything. The job poster only needs one HTML
input element to upload this file or a link to this file.
- When you sign up for a new job portal, just give them this file; it has all
the information they need.
- Parsing has never been easier. All major programming languages have libraries
to parse YAML, JSON, etc. There will be no ambiguity.
It doesn't end here. It has more benefits.
- You can still create a resume from the YAML file. Tools such as
resumaker will create resumes for
you from these types of YAML files.
- You can have a massive YAML file where everything is included, and when you
upload this file, the company will only extract the information it needs from
the YAML or JSON key.
- Finding candidates becomes easier for companies. Sites have
robots.txt files
containing rules for crawlers. You can put your resume file on your website,
such as sujauddin.me/resume.yml. We just need to agree on a standard.